Poetiken des Traumas. Mit Analysen zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina, Monika Marons Stille Zeile Sechs und Terézia Moras Alle Tage by Annette Vieth

Abstract

Reviews 263 history of German-language journalism in this period, of which Kisch is a significant representative. Such is the contextual detail provided, the chapters will likewise offer much to both military and cultural historians with an interest in Pola, a fascinating, liminal location with a long and rich history (it is mentioned in Dante’s Inferno, as Kisch himself notes). Historical photographs and maps are included in the sections dealing with the Austrian air force, submarine fleet and the Marinekasino in Pola. Robeck is able to probe the veracity of Kisch’s claimed experiences, crossreferencing the details he provides with the known historical data. And the readings of the texts themselves employ the methods of the literary historian effectively. Robeck unpicks Kisch’s narrative strategies, and his use of metaphor and cultural references, to provide convincing interpretations. She points, for example, to the use of the submarine exercise as a study in military psychology (a ‘Tauchgang [...] in die Seele des modernen Kriegers’ (p. 100)). She reads the superficially trivial, Feuilleton-like article about the ‘night life’ of Pola in symbolic terms, suggesting that the portrayal of the ‘in militärischer Konvention und beschämender Gleichgültigkeit erstarrte Offizierskorps in Pola’ (p. 128) feeds into a cynical reckoning with the doomed monarchy as a whole. This compact volume thus offers much, yet is also, arguably, incomplete, for it does not cover the other articles filed by Kisch from Pola in the same detail (there were six in total, all published in Bohemia). It is not without its formal peculiarities, which include the aforementioned lengthy ‘Exkursus’ in a smaller font, which surely could have been included in the main text, and a number of excessively lengthy, digressive footnotes. Despite these reservations this will certainly become essential reading for scholars of Kisch and there is plenty to recommend it. Jon Hughes Royal Holloway University of London Poetiken des Traumas. Mit Analysen zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina, Monika Marons Stille Zeile Sechs und Terézia Moras Alle Tage. By Annette Vieth. Interkulturelle Moderne, 8. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. 563 pp. €49.80. ISBN 978–3-8260–6588–0. In recent years, trauma has become a key concept in cultural and literature studies. Combining individual with sociocultural history, trauma challenges literatureasnarrativemedium,questioningwhetherdeepemotionaldisturbance can be represented at all. Despite its popularity, the main influence on the philological discourse on trauma is still classical psychoanalysis, for example Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Annette Vieth’s study seeks to develop a literary point of view which is also aware of current developments in clinical psychology and argues that poetics of trauma are an underlying structural principle of a great variety of novels and hence paradigmatic for modern literature. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, Vieth discusses trauma in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971), Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile Sechs (1991) Reviews 264 and Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (2004). Her aim is to gain a broader understanding of trauma as literary topos, especially regarding narrative strategies used to speak about the ostensibly unspeakable, while providing new insights into the sociocultural function of literature. Poetiken des Traumas gives an extensive overview of the discourse on trauma as well as recent developments in psychology and psychoanalysis, covering aspects such as trauma and memory, trauma as result of sexual (child) abuse, individual versus collective trauma and gender implications of traumatic experience (pp. 54–96). In a second step, Vieth introduces literary reflections on trauma and language by Jean Améry, Imre Kertész and Ruth Klüger (pp. 96–126). Finding poststructuralist uses of the concept too vague and metaphorical, she orientates her understanding of trauma towards clinical definitions. Her methodological approach is hermeneutic and ‘empathiegeleitet[]’ (p. 112). The three main chapters each discuss one of the novels mentioned above. Since Vieth emphasizes the importance of the authors’ biographies for understanding their literary takes on trauma, these chapters offer extensive information on their lives as well as the literary and sociocultural contexts for their works. Her choice of texts by Bachmann, Maron and Mora enables Vieth to cover three main sources of both collective and individual trauma in the twentieth century (at least from a European point of view): the...